“The Blanton-Webster Band featured what many feel was Ellington’s best ensemble, including young bassist Jimmy Blanton and tenor great Ben Webster...” - JW

AKA I've Got It Bad (and That Ain't Good) Rank 61 Music Duke Ellington Lyrics Paul Francis Webster   Considered by some as her best performance, “I Got It Bad” was introduced by Ivie Anderson in Jump for Joy. The West Coast musical revue opened on July 10, 1941, at the Mayan Theater in Los Angeles and ran for 101 performances. Although the show’s run was short, in October a Duke Ellington recording, also featuring Anderson and with solos by Ellington and Johnny Hodges, became a hit, rising on the pop charts to number thirteen. A month later, Benny Goodman and His Orchestra would also score with their recording which had the further distinction of being Peggy Lee’s first hit vocal. Ironically, Goodman’s trumpeter Cootie Williams played the Ellington song in the Goodman band after leaving Ellington the previous year.   Chart information used by permission from Joel Whitburn's Pop Memories 1890-1954       More on Ivie Anderson   That Duke Ellington wrote the score for Jump for Joy was a reflection of his interest and activity in the Civil Rights Movement. According to Ellington’s long-term publicist Patricia Willard, the all black musical revue “aimed at banishing forever the stereotypical eyerolling, dialect, and shuffling gait” that was prevalent in that period’s movies and plays. Sid Kuller and Paul Francis Webster wrote the majority of the lyrics. Subtitled “A Sun-Tanned Revu-sical,” Jump for Joy boasted a cast of 60, including the Ellington orchestra, Ivie Anderson, Marie Bryant, Joe Turner, Herb Jeffries, Dorothy Dandridge, and comedian Wonderful Smith. In addition to “I Got It Bad,” the revue included, “Jump for Joy,” “Chocolate Shake” and two songs that have become minor standards, “Rocks In My Bed” and “The Brown Skin Gal in the Calico Gown.” All of the aforementioned songs are included on Duke Ellington: The Blanton-Webster Band, a three-CD set of 66 tracks recorded from 1939 to 1941. The Blanton-Webster Band featured what many feel was Ellington’s best ensemble, including young bassist Jimmy Blanton and tenor great Ben Webster, with compositions and arrangements by Billy Strayhorn. Other greats included in the spectacular lineup were Johnny Hodges, Cootie Williams (replaced by Ray Nance on some cuts), Rex Stewart, Juan Tizol, and Barney Bigard. Also in the show but not on the three-CD set were “Uncle Tom’s Cabin Is a Drive-In Now,” “I’ve Got a Passport from Georgia (and I’m Sailing for the U.S.A.)” and a composition by Ellington’s son Mercer, “Stomp Caprice,” which was used for a dance number by Al Guster. Mercer would later note that there was a pronounced militancy in this anti-Uncle Tom musical, a militancy that would result in death threats and the opening of a file on Ellington by the FBI. Despite mostly good reviews and enthusiastic audiences, the show faced profit concerns and talent losses to the escalating military effort of World War II. Jump for Joy closed on September 27, 1941. Its short run was a great disappointment to Ellington who had hoped the show, and its message, would make it to Broadway.     More on Duke Ellington       More on Paul Francis Webster

More information on this tune... Allen Forte The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era, 1924-1950: A Study in Musical Design Princeton University Press Hardcover: 336 pages (Forte devotes five pages to the song’s history and an analysis of the music.) See the Reading and Research page for this tune for additional references. - Jeremy Wilson

This section suggests definitive or otherwise significant recordings that will help jazz students get acquainted with “I Got It Bad (and That Ain't Good).” These recordings have been selected from the Jazz History and CD Recommendations sections.

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Duke Ellington’s original “I Got It Bad,” (Never No Lament: The Blanton-Webster Band) featuring Johnny Hodges and Ivie Anderson, is unarguably the definitive version of this beautiful tune. Thelonious Monk’s 1955 rendition (Plays Duke Ellington) is a more recent classic, with Monk showing the tune’s appropriateness as a modern jazz vehicle while paying tribute to Ellington, one of his own musical heroes.

Noah Baerman - Jazz Pianist and Educator

In his Ellington biography Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington, John Edward Hasse commented that Paul Francis Webster’s vernacular lyric, “for a change begins to approach the quality of Ellington’s music.” Hasse is not alone in this observation, with others more bluntly declaring the lyrics of Ellington songs markedly improved after he terminated his association with Irving Mills and his associates. Webster and the quality of his lyrics invoke a certain irony—that is, the concept of this skillful craftsman assembling slangy phrases that would make an English teacher wince. It is also interesting to note that the grammar violations are restricted to the refrain; the verse, which is relatively articulate and astute, almost seems to belong in another song.

Written in the popular 32-bar A-A-B-A form, “I Got It Bad” takes the first four bars of each A section to declare a lament, such as “Never treats me sweet and gentle …” and then uses the remaining four bars to state the title phrase, “I Got It Bad and that Ain’t Good!” The refrain is repeated with a second set of lyrics, the B sections lending an air of complacence and hopelessness to the already bleak picture, including the line published with the sheet music, “I’m glad I’m mad about him I can’t live without him.” On the original recording, Ivie Anderson sang it another way, admitting a bit of complicity, “My man and me we gin’ some and sin some and then some.”

“I Got It Bad” is a favorite of jazz instrumentalists and vocalists, the latter usually being female. It is also a composition that draws praise from musicologists, particularly its harmonies and its melodic contour, which includes the jump of a ninth from d to e in the first measure, a stretch that is fun for musicians but can be a hurdle for vocalists. In his book The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era, Allen Forte disagrees. Pronouncing “I Got It Bad” a splendid song, he says the claimed difficulty for singers is “pure nonsense, not only because any professional singer can easily navigate this interval but also because the symmetric placement of the notes in the melody is perfectly clear …” He goes on to say that it is the octave relation between the d’s preceding and following the e that is important. -JW

Musical analysis of “I Got It Bad (and That Ain’t Good)”
Original Key	G major
Form	A – A – B – A
Tonality	Primarily major
Movement	Primarily chromatic and step-wise; however, there is one very large upward leap of a ninth in the first measure and a few skips throughout the song.
Comments     (assumed background)
At an octave and a tri-tone, this song has one of the widest ranges of any standard. That, with several chromatic lead-ins, makes this one of the more difficult pieces for vocalists. Harmonic rhythm is fairly slow except in the penultimate measures of the “A” section, where there is a chord change on every beat. Technically, it is a member of the I – vi – II7 – V7 family. But this song stretches this particular progression a bit by adding another vi after the II7, returning it to II7, after which this shifts to its parallel minor, functioning as a ii7 of I. Instead of going to V7, however, it returns to III7, making its way back to the tonic through the circle of fifths (here is the one chord change per beat). Section “B” uses the IV – iv – I progression of “Star Dust” and “After You’ve Gone” for the first four measures, then does its own circle of fifths using minor substitutions from iii7 (in the original key, iii – VI7 = ii7 – V7).
K. J. McElrath - Musicologist for JazzStandards.com

Pianist Joe Sullivan, a graduate of the Chicago Music Conservatory, was a consummate band player, yet in later years he worked mostly solo. His career, which began in the Windy City in the 1920s, included stints as Bing Crosby’s accompanist and a short spell in brother Bob Crosby’s big band. But because of his musical company over the years, he was often typecast as a “Dixieland” player, a term he despised (as do most players of classic jazz).

Sullivan had a very “barrelhouse” approach to the piano but also a marvelous, lighter way with ballads. “I Got it Bad” was a favorite number of his (he liked to call it “I Got It Good and That Ain’t Bad”) and his 1944 version is first-rate.

Chris Tyle - Jazz Musician and Historian

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Joe Sullivan 1944-1945 Classic 1070

“I Got It Bad (and That Ain't Good)” was included in these films:

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• Jump for Joy (1941, Herb Jeffries)
• The Mouse Comes to Dinner aka Mouse to Dinner (1945) Tom and Jerry cartoon
• This Could Be the Night (1957, Julie Wilson)
• Miami Rhapsody (1995, 1st time Ella Fitzgerald; 2nd time Louis Armstrong)
• The Big Lebowski (1998, Nina Simone)
• Eyes Wide Shut (1999, The Oscar Peterson Trio)
• The Human Stain (2003, The Oscar Peterson Trio)
• The Catcher in the Rye (2004, The Oscar Peterson Trio)

And on stage:

• Bubbling Brown Sugar (1976, Ethel Beatty) Broadway musical
• Sophisticated Ladies (1981, Phyllis Hyman, Terri Klausner) Broadway musical
• Play On! (1997, Carl Anderson) Broadway musical

And on television:

• Play On! (2000, Raun Ruffin) PBS Great Performances

This section shows the jazz standards written by the same writing team.

Duke Ellington and Paul Francis Webster
Year	Rank	Title
1941	61	“I Got It Bad (and That Ain't Good)”

Duke Ellington, Sid Kuller and Paul Francis Webster
Year	Rank	Title
1941	935	“Jump for Joy”

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